Word: trivia
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Institute's collection begins with an 1888 recording of Poet Robert Browning shouting "Hip, hip, hooray!" for Edison's new machine, and encompasses every form of music right up to the rock 'n' rollers. "Today's trivia," explains Striker, "may interest tomorrow's historian." Singers such as Resnik, Sutherland and Gianna d'Angelo visit the Institute to hear how their predecessors interpreted a role, conductors and musicologists to hear little-known works...
...Inge-art. After all when pretty Tom (aspiring actor) and pregnant Teena (aspiring wife) step on stage in their underwear and start singing a cigarette add ("The Breeze at night is just as good as the Breeze in the morning") one certainly gets a fine sense of trivia. Shortly we discover (gasp of Recognition) that the play is really about the younger generation and growing up and accepting responsibility. Tom and Teena, we find, live unmarriedly in midtown Manhattan in a messy apartment displaying anti-bourgeois scorn for neatly preserved possessions (their sofa is an automobile seat) and a flair...
Bogged Down in Trivia. The report's basic assumption is that California's great university system has attracted "a substantial portion of the most highly trained, intelligent, curious and creative individuals in America." They are the main value of a university, in its role as a "continuing critic" of society. Many such individuals are bound to "pursue paths that the great majority of people regard as silly, dangerous or both." But "there is hardly a single example, either in America or elsewhere, of a distinguished university which has been directly responsible to popular opinion." Quite properly...
Nevertheless, Byrne and his eight-man staff argue that the regents have failed to confine themselves to broad policymaking functions and have got bogged down in administrative trivia: "In a typical month of 1964, the President sent the regents 400 pages of complex material, running to several hundred thousand words." Moreover, the system has no clear delegation of authority or systematic code of laws: officials "constantly refer to university regulations which are difficult or impossible to find...
These truths are such a minuscule portion of the whole truth about how Harvard undergraduates have changed over the last "couple of decades"--of the whole truth about the role that parietal rules play in the lives of many of them--that I must struggle to believe these--essentially--trivia could become the center of any Faculty and Administrative discussion...